I returned from a lecture tour in Germany; 20 lectures in 11 days in nine different cities. In recent years the frequency of the invitations I receive grows, and during my lectures I dedicate much time to the despicable, sadistic behavior of most Germans during the Holocaust – the hundreds of thousands of murders of European Jewry and the tens of millions who were overjoyed by the mass extermination of the hated Jews.

I usually speak before audiences whose grandparents were those Germans. In the case of school children it may even be the great grandparents. Through my personal story I detail the crimes and basic inhumanity, and the audiences arrive in large numbers and always applaud me at length.

My last meeting in Berlin, on the eve of my return to Israel, was organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation at the German capital’s public library. It was a cold evening, -16 degrees Celsius, with snow piling up in the streets and the few cars outside having trouble making their way through it. The organizers expected a small audience, if at all, and I too didn’t expect much.

Yet reality was different. The 90-seat venue filled up within minutes, and dozens of chairs had to be brought in. Here too, the audience sat and attentively listened to my words, and again it applauded at length. As always, I proceeded to take questions. I responded to two women, and then a man stood up, in his 40s or 50s.

“You claim,” he said, and I immediately stopped him: “I’m not claiming. I’m telling facts.” The man continued to ask whether I saw gas chambers with my own eyes, yet before I had time to tell him about the reality I saw in Auschwitz and Birkenau, with the gas chambers and crematoria, several of those in attendance stood up and started yelling “raus, raus. “Out” in German. The man did not comply of course, and then several men charged at him and forcefully dragged him out while beating him up.

Readers at the library who wondered what the commotion was all about were told the man was a Holocaust denier, and everyone was happy to see him thrown out.

This is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen in the dozens or hundreds of times I appeared in Germany thus far. The response of the audience to the provocation taught me that there are indeed “other Germans.”

It is true that even today quite a few Germans are latent anti-Semites. Many are not willing to believe that their fathers or grandfathers indeed murdered Jews, and they cannot speak out only because of the law that bans Holocaust denial and religious incitement.

At the same time, more and more people in Germany are starting to understand in recent years what the Germans of yore did to the Jewish people, and to the whole world. (End quote)

This is the first law when approaching the "Holy People," everything they say is truth, not “claims."

This is why the book 'The Great Holocaust Trial,' reprinted this month, is important: when these "infallible survivors" were on a witness stand in the Toronto trial of Ernst Zundel, subject to cross-examination by Zundel's defense attorney Doug Christie, their "facts" dissolved into thin air. The butcher's bill for that revisionist victory came years later, when Zundel suffered seven years' imprisonment in Canadian and German dungeons.

Klieger writes, "...during my lectures I dedicate much time to the despicable, sadistic behavior of most Germans during the Holocaust..."

Here we see how the religion of Holocaustianity has as its most perverse component the racist defamation of the "despicable, sadistic" German people. It is illegal in Germany to refer to the Judaic nation in these terms but vile anti-German hatred is licensed as a form of human rights education under the rubric of "Holocaustianity."

Klieger further states that, "tens of millions (of Germans)...were overjoyed by the mass extermination of the hated Jews."

How did you ascertain this figure, Mr. Klieger? What proof do you have that the German people were aware of alleged gas chamber extermination, much less were ‘overjoyed’ by it? Of course I realize that merely posing these questions to your Royal Highness could result in this writer receiving a (justifiable) beating, but I will run that risk.

The rest of the 'report' by Mr. Klieger is run-of-the-mill Talmudic arrogance, violence and terrorism: a German heretic asks a skeptical question at a speech in a library given by a Judaic 'Holocaust" saint. The heretic is beaten and thrown out of the library. The loving, tolerant, humanist Noah Klieger comments, "and everyone was happy to see him thrown out."

As we approach the complete triumph of Judaic supremacy in the West, the Talmudic mentality will no longer need to cloak itself and we will be treated to more of this open gloating over the violent suppression of opponents, which is so at variance with the cinematic and academic mythos concerning Judiasm's relationship with heretics and heresy, i.e. as the forever hunted ones. But when Judaics themselves unleash the dogs and become the hunters there is no Steven Spielberg or New York Times to record it for posterity. It is up to us to do so.

In observing this trial I was not only interested in the networks of corruption, of which Talmudic Judaics are often the leaders and main players, but of the fantastic interlocking relationships with power which Judaics on all sides of the case, from the prosecution to the defense, possessed. Nearly everyone seems to be an impressively-credentially graduate of a presitgious yeshiva or law school; from those institutions it's on to an elite investment firm, a Supreme Court clerkship or some kind of White House appointment. The defendant, Rabbi Balkany, was close to Vice-President Dan Quayle and had a seat on the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Jason Furman, the brother of Balkany’s prosecutor, Jesse Furman, is deputy director of President Obama’s National Economic Council.

A critic might opine that the account of the decline and fall of Rabbi Balkany is testimony to the fact that in America we really are all equal, and that being a member of "The Tribe" is no guarantee of privilege or immunity.

My response would be say that this is incredibly naive, if not disingenous. Talmudists are prosecuted and jailed only when their crimes become so visibly outrageous they threaten the entire edifice of La Kosher Nostra. Out-of-control, avaricious renegades are put in their place so as to preserve the American operations of the enterprise itself.

The signature symbol in this stagecraft that is part Merchant of Venice and wholly Talmudic, is glimpsed at the point at which the rabbi's wife spots the garish, masonic "Great Seal of the United States" hanging on the wall of the Federal courtroom, where images of Jesus Christ and the crucifix are of course banned. She points approvingly at the hexagon (the six-pointed, misnamed "Star of David") within the Great Seal, as if to say, 'Like most everything else in America, we own this place too.'

Lastly, we are duty bound to note that we can take no credit for being related to the author of this investigative piece, Allison Hoffman.

EXCERPTS:

"As one person told me, (Rabbi) Balkany is the kind of guy who will try to find a shortcut if you tell him to cross the street at the light."

"Balkany’s brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, was sentenced last summer to 27 years in prison on charges of financial fraud.”

“You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

“...at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan...the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. 'It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,' joked Gary Friedman..."

One of the people who came to support Balkany in court every day was Chesed Halberstam, a long-bearded, bespectacled man who spent 17 years as a personal aide to the wife of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson....Every morning, he took a bound copy of the Torah that had once belonged to the rebbe out of a black leather carrying case, handed it to Balkany, and then parked himself in the front row, just behind the defense table. I asked him why he took it from Balkany every time court recessed, instead of lending it to the rabbi for the duration of the trial. “It’s worth a great deal, so I don’t let it out of my sight,” explained Halberstam. He added that he hoped that the book might bring Balkany luck, even if he only held on to it a few hours each day. (Emphasis supplied by Michael Hoffman)

Courtroom 11B in the white-marble Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse, near City Hall, has hanging on its back wall a plaque of the Great Seal of the United States: an image of an eagle crowned by 13 tiny stars representing the original colonies, arranged in the pattern of a Star of David. On the second day of the trial, Sarah Balkany, a short, plump woman who sat through much of the trial studying her own small prayer book, spotted it, smiled, and leaned over to point it out to one of her daughters, Rosie, who smiled too and patted her mother’s hand.

Ironically, it was the government that invoked the principles of Jewish law before the jury. “Well-reputed, prominent members of his community gave praise to Rabbi Balkany, and the acknowledgment, this acknowledgment had a Hebrew name,” Marc Berger, the 36-year-old deputy head of the securities task force in the U.S. attorney’s office, explained in his closing. “It was called a 'hakorus hatov”(recognizing when someone is owed a debt of gratitude --Michael Hoffman).

Rabbi Balkany's lawyer Brafman stood up to give his defense speech:

Brafman is famous for his courtroom prowess—a performer so worth seeing that other lawyers stopped in to watch him. At five feet six inches, he barely reaches Berger’s shoulder, but as he took the podium, his barrel chest puffed out, and he seemed to fill the room. He adjusted his French cuffs and began. “Just so we’re clear, lying on those tapes, everybody lied,” he said. “There should be no question in your mind that everybody lied. Klotz lied to Balkany. Balkany lied to Klotz.” Brafman backed into the middle of the courtroom, away from his notes, speaking in increasingly outraged tones. “Are we nuts? We’re not nuts. None of us are nuts. I don’t think we’re nuts. But we’re listening to conversations that are nuts,” Brafman argued. “You can’t just convict Rabbi Balkany because he had some stupid conversations that the government has suggested to you show that he’s guilty of a crime,” he went on. “He did not act with the requisite criminal knowledge or intent that these crimes will require you to find beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Brafman paused, reaching into a repertoire that stretches back to his early days working for Robert Morgenthau in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. “Now, you have an argument with somebody, even somebody you love, whoever gets the last word, man, that’s a powerful moment, and that’s the advantage the government gets, because they have the disadvantage of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brafman said. “But here is my thought on that, and I think I’m right, and I hope you agree. They don’t have the last word. You do.” Let’s fight the man, was what he meant—you, me, and the rabbi against Steve Cohen and the government.

Jesse Furman got up to give the government’s response. Furman, a mild 38-year-old, is Brafman’s antithesis in almost every way: rumpled where Brafman is immaculately tailored, precisely spoken where Brafman releases Brooklyn-inflected torrents of words, an Upper West Sider who attends the traditional-egalitarian Ansche Chesed synagogue while Brafman is a trustee of Beth Sholom Synagogue in Lawrence, on Long Island. Furman’s father, Jay, is a successful real estate developer active in prominent New York and Jewish charities, while his mother, Gail, is a well-known Democratic fundraiser. His brother, Jason [29], is deputy director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Jesse Furman went from Harvard to Yale Law and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Tribal Allegiance

A Brooklyn rabbi thought he could swindle hedge-fund king Steven Cohen by playing on his Judaism. It was a bad bet

Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire [1] hedge-fund manager, doesn’t take cold calls. If you dial the headquarters of Cohen’s $12 billion fund, SAC Capital Advisors, in Stamford, Connecticut, a pleasant-voiced receptionist will kindly offer to take a message, which Cohen’s assistant will screen without disturbing her boss, who typically spends the hours of the trading day deeply engrossed in the numbers flashing across the eight screens mounted at his desk. He communicates with his fellow traders through desktop squawk boxes, and they watch him via an in-house video feed referred to as “the Steve Cam [2].”

A phone message deemed sufficiently mysterious might be passed to SAC’s general counsel, Peter Nussbaum, which is how Nussbaum wound up talking last winter to an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Milton Balkany, who said he had information that was potentially damaging to SAC. The rabbi had, wittingly or not, called on a December day when everyone in Cohen’s orbit was on high alert. The morning’s New York Times featured a story [3] about rumors linking SAC to the government’s investigation of a rival fund, the Galleon Group—which has since blossomed into one of the largest insider-trading probes in Wall Street history. The same afternoon, Cohen’s ex-wife, Patricia, filed a sensational civil suit [4] alleging that he had traded on inside information in the 1980s, while they were still married. (Cohen has moved for dismissal.)

Balkany introduced himself as the dean of a Jewish girls’ school in Brooklyn. He may as well have been calling from another planet—one governed by shtetl values dictating that Jews should accord a high degree of loyalty to each other. The rabbi claimed that, in the course of his work counseling Jewish prisoners, he had learned that the government was pressuring an inmate to give up information about Cohen, and that, as a fellow Jew, he didn’t want to see harm befall the hedge-fund manager, even though they didn’t know each other. It quickly emerged that Balkany wanted something in return—$2 million in cash for his struggling school, Bais Yaakov of Midwood, and a $2 million loan for his former yeshiva, Mesivta Torah Vodaath, one of the oldest and largest of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox high schools. And one more thing: He wanted a 20-minute meeting with Cohen for his son-in-law, an aspiring financier who dreamed of pitching his idol on an investment idea.

The conversation with Nussbaum set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Balkany, a onetime power broker known as “the Brooklyn Bundler,” being found guilty in federal court last month of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements to a government agent. His trial, in a wood-paneled courtroom in lower Manhattan, played out as a kind of Jewish commedia dell’arte. Balkany, the bearded rabbi, was dressed in customary dark suits accessorized with a black velvet yarmulke. He shared the defense table with a Brooklyn boy made good: the lawyer Benjamin Brafman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is famous for representing high-profile celebrities like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Plaxico Burress. The government’s case was argued by Marc Berger and Jesse Furman, both Jewish and Ivy League-educated assistant U.S. attorneys. In the public gallery, Balkany’s wife and a rotating cast of his 13 sons and daughters made up a kind of Greek chorus, sighing and clucking as the damaging testimony added up.

In his various phone calls and meetings with SAC’s lawyers, Balkany had repeated one phrase as if it would insulate him from suspicion: “I’m not a hold-up man.” He would then invariably assert the value of the work his school was doing in the community, or his good character as a Jew. “I’m not here to threaten some—God forbid, I’m on the other side of the fence,” Balkany told Nussbaum in one taped conversation. “You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

Cohen, the Long Island-raised son of a Seventh Avenue garmento, never met Balkany, and he never came anywhere near the courtroom during Balkany’s trial in November. The closest he got, at least publicly, was a modern art auction [5] at Christie’s, 60 blocks uptown. But the rabbi was the least of Cohen’s problems that month: The government’s insider-trading investigation was reaching fever pitch. Two weeks after the trial wrapped up, government agents served SAC and two other hedge funds with subpoenas [6] and began making arrests.

And yet, from the start, Cohen’s lawyers took the rabbi seriously. Within days of Balkany’s first call to Connecticut, SAC’s outside counsel, a former prosecutor named Martin Klotz, reported the rabbi to federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District—the same office pursuing the insider-trading investigation against Galleon. The SAC attorneys agreed to take the step of going undercover, taping hours of conversations that were crucial to the government’s case against Balkany. The rabbi, it seems, provided an excellent opportunity for Cohen’s team to do the government “a solid,” as one lawyer who has represented clients in the insider-trading investigation into Galleon put it to me. Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Philadelphia, explained SAC’s decision to participate as a savvy legal move. “They could say they have a culture of compliance,” he said, “and Exhibit A is this case.”

Now Balkany, who assumed that by presenting himself as a concerned “co-religionist” he could establish a real connection to Cohen, is facing up to 20 years in prison. And it’s all because the rabbi made a simple mistake: believing that, just because he imagined they shared a special bond as Jews, Cohen would feel the same way.

On November 1, 2010, the first day of the trial, Brafman, Balkany’s lawyer, urged the jury—three men and nine women, all but two of them black or Latino—not to judge his client as a Jew. “I represent the man with the white beard and black yarmulke,” Brafman said, by way of introduction. “Look at yourselves,” he went on. “Nobody on the jury looks like Rabbi Balkany. That’s not a jury of one’s peers.” It was an effective rhetorical gesture, but it sounded almost absurd in the context of a case that turned on Balkany’s effort to trade on his and Cohen’s shared Jewish heritage. “Frankly, I, I really, I’m doing this as a Jew to a Jew,” Balkany had insisted in a taped conversation with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel. “I’m just stepping in, really, to be of help to him.”

The plan to extort Steve Cohen appears to have originated at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, which the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. “It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,” joked Gary Friedman, the executive director of Jewish Prisoner Services International [7], an organization that provides services to Jewish inmates. Balkany was a regular visitor to the camp and, in his recorded conversations with SAC’s lawyers, said it was an inmate named David Schick who provided the connection to Hayim Regensberg, the man Balkany claimed was being pressured to give information on SAC. Schick, the scion of a famous bakery dynasty in Brooklyn, is an Orthodox Jew who defrauded [8] his investors of as much as $200 million in the late 1990s.

Regensberg is serving a 100-month sentence for running a Ponzi scheme, and his lawyer, Robert Baum, told me he believes his client has information that may be of interest to the government. Indeed, some of the details that Balkany dangled in his conversations with SAC have proven to connect to real investigations—particularly concerning a healthcare fund called FrontPoint, which is embroiled [9] in its own insider-trading scandal. But prison officials testified during Balkany’s trial that the rabbi never visited Regensberg during the months he spent negotiating with SAC, and federal investigators testified that no one from the government ever spoke to him about the insider-trading investigations, let alone approached him with an offer to cut a deal in exchange for information. “They haven’t tried to follow up,” Baum told me, in late November.

In Jewish terms, Cohen made a strange target. He and his wife, Alexandra—who grew up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family in Washington Heights—do not, according to tax records filed by their family foundation, give to Jewish communal organizations or to synagogues, but choose instead to shower millions on hospitals, urban-youth programs, and the schools where their children are enrolled—including Brown University, from which Cohen’s son, Robert, graduated in 2009. Cohen also sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation [10], a group devoted to fighting poverty in New York. Of the millions his foundation has given away since it was set up in 2001, the only significant donation to a Jewish cause was $25,000 to a religious-outreach group called Gateways, which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, to buy a table at a gala fundraising dinner in 2004. (The group’s director, Mordechai Suchard, told me he couldn’t remember who was being honored.)

In the wake of Balkany’s arrest, and amid a wave of publicity [11] surrounding Cohen’s ex-wife Patricia, Steve and Alex Cohen earlier this year announced a $50 million gift [12] to an organization that is at least nominally Jewish: the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which will use the money to expand its children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, south of Great Neck, where Cohen grew up. “Stevie Cohen is one of the most charitable people I know, and he’s done extremely well,” said his former boss Howard Silverman, who gave Cohen his start on Wall Street 30 years ago, at the boutique investment firm Gruntal & Co. “He wasn’t into his religion—he was just Jewish, like anyone else.”

As an undergraduate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Cohen was a brother in the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau and in 2007 gave the fraternity a $2 million gift [15]. Now 54, Cohen evinces little outward connection to the Jewish Establishment—though he has been a generous political contributor to both parties and last summer reportedly hosted a dinner [16] at his Greenwich estate for Republican strategists that included the Israel advocate Dan Senor, author [17] of Start-Up Nation, who has been bruited as a possible Senate candidate in 2012. But in a city full of high-profile Jewish spenders, Cohen doesn’t engage in the antics of, say, his fellow hedge-funder Stephen Schwarzman, the New York Public Library donor who threw himself a $5 million birthday party that made the front page [18] of the Wall Street Journal, or of David Brooks, the Long Island defense contractor who threw a $10 million bat mitzvah [19]—complete with performances from Aerosmith and Tom Petty—for his daughter Elizabeth in 2005, before being charged in 2007 with insider trading and securities fraud. (Brooks was found guilty [20] at trial in September.)

Yet, from the start, Balkany attempted to establish a Jewish rapport with his interlocutors—even where there wasn’t any to be made. A few days after his first phone call, Balkany met with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel, at his gracious red-brick home in Brooklyn. The first thing Balkany asked Klotz, as they sat down over some snacks, was whether he was a Jew. “He said, ‘Are you Jewish, or Polish, or’—and it was sort of like, ‘What?’ ” Klotz, a graying, square-faced man whose family is German but not Jewish, testified with a bemused grin. A concealed camera captured a similar conversation between Nussbaum, SAC’s in-house lawyer, and the rabbi when they met in Stamford, in early January of this year. “What is your Hebrew name, Peter?” Balkany asked. Nussbaum, whose decidedly un-Hebraic middle name is Addison, told the rabbi that his German-born Jewish grandparents in Queens had been religious, but his father had insisted on a completely secular home. “So, we have to have you have a bar mitzvah!” Balkany responded, delighted. In court, months later, when one of the prosecutors asked Nussbaum—a tall, thin-faced, WASPy-looking man with a receding cap of sandy, straight hair—whether he considered himself ethnically Jewish, he answered with a curt “Yes.”

Balkany’s case was the kind that usually doesn’t make it to trial. From the start, it was obvious that the government would be hard-pressed to lose. Everything, except for the first few phone calls Balkany made to SAC, was on tape. Over the course of the first four days of the trial, the jury heard hours of Balkany, in his distinctive lilt, wheedling and cajoling SAC representatives and undercover FBI agents he was told were SAC executives in more than 50 phone calls. The ask was simple: If Cohen gave him $4 million in checks for Bais Yaakov and Torah Vodaath, he would magically transmute it into “good will” with Regensberg, the inmate, who Balkany said he would instruct to keep quiet about “Connecticut.” “I want to tell you, this is a heavy lift,” Balkany told Klotz on the phone last January. The next day, when he met Klotz and Nussbaum in Stamford, he elaborated. “I don’t consider it a lot of money, and I’ll tell you why—not because he’s so rich,” Balkany explained. “I think, even if he was able to maintain the business, but if he had to go into this thing, you’re talking $20 million, $30 million.”

It’s impossible to know what the rabbi was thinking as he sat at the defense table listening to his own charade. He did not take the stand, and his lawyer, Brafman, declined interviews on the rabbi’s behalf. (“Talking too much and using poor judgment got him into this mess,” Brafman told me.) At 64, Balkany looks a little like a bearded Donald Sutherland, with the same bright white hair and bulbous features, always in a black or gray suit and a crisp white shirt with a black tie and a black velvet yarmulke, sometimes clutching a simple white ceramic mezuzah. As the trial progressed, he sometimes followed along with transcripts that were stacked in a three-ring binder. Other times, he stared off into space, or read from a bound copy of the Torah.

But a guy with the chutzpah to try and swindle Steve Cohen, a man legendary for his business acumen, is also the kind of person who would insist on going for broke with a jury trial rather than take a government plea offer. “Rabbi Balkany would not plead guilty because he insisted that he did not intentionally violate the law,” Brafman told me after the trial ended, when we met at his office in Midtown Manhattan—a comfortable room with cream-colored furniture, expansive views out over the East River, and walls cluttered with framed newspaper clippings and signed headshots from his celebrity clients. (Brafman reduced his normal fees for the rabbi.)

The rabbi was arrested once before, in 2003, on charges of misappropriating $700,000 in federal funds designated for paying down two school mortgages. (The New York Post dubbed him “Robbi [21].”) In that episode, Brafman convinced prosecutors to suspend their case in exchange for Balkany agreeing to return the money. This time around, Balkany clearly believed that he was tricked, over the course of two months of negotiations with Klotz, into going further than he’d ever intended at the outset. “Look, I told you from where I’m coming, you know, that I’d like him to participate in a couple of charities,” he told Klotz last December, shortly after their meeting in Brooklyn. “If, after you’ve shared the name and you’ve come back, well, it’s really of no consequence whatsoever, fine, you know, good luck and that’s it. Then I’m still happy we had our meeting.” Klotz said he understood. “You know, on the five percent chance that, you know, it could explode, there was somebody out there willing to take the time to sit down and to pass it on,” Balkany replied, “and give him the opportunity to divert, you know, this type of thing.”

As one person told me, Balkany is the kind of guy who will try to find a shortcut if you tell him to cross the street at the light. He was born in Detroit, where his father was a stock manager for General Motors and his mother worked as a typist. According to Balkany’s older brother, Louis, now a vascular surgeon in Toledo, Ohio, the family kept kosher but wasn’t Sabbath observant, until one day his brother—known to his family by his Hebrew name, Yehoshua—announced he wanted to leave his public school and go to a local yeshiva, Beth Yehuda.

Balkany won a scholarship to attend Torah Vodaath, a yeshiva in Brooklyn, and he stayed in New York after he was ordained as a rabbi in the late 1960s, eventually taking over as principal at Bais Yaakov. On a plane to Florida, he met Sarah Rubashkin, a daughter of Aaron Rubashkin, founder of Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking empire, who occupies a position of near-royalty in the Lubavitch community. They soon married, and their first child was born in 1969. (Agriprocessors was itself recently the target of a wide-ranging federal investigation; Balkany’s brother-in-law, Sholom Rubashkin, was sentenced [22] last summer to 27 years in prison on charges of financial fraud.) “The Rubashkin family, they thought it was an intermarriage,” Louis Balkany recalled to me over the phone. Milton Balkany never became a Lubavitcher, maintaining his distinct version of Hasidic observance, and making his life in Borough Park, a few miles away from the Lubavitch enclave of Crown Heights.

By the late 1980s, he had established himself as a successful political fundraiser, mainly for Republicans; according to a May 1990 report in Common Cause, Balkany bragged that lobbyists called him “the million-dollar-a-year man.” He had a seat on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and once gave an invocation during a reception thrown by Dan Quayle, then vice president. “He was quirky, in the sense that he went to minyan first thing in the morning but he wore John Lobb [23] shoes,” said a former Bush Administration staffer, referring to the bespoke brand popular with Republican heavyweights at the time.

Over the years, he developed a reputation as someone who had access not just to elected officials but to various government agencies, particularly the Bureau of Prisons, where attorneys found Balkany’s help invaluable in getting their clients’ requests addressed. “There was one case with a client who was in prison in the Midwest, and I was really at my wit’s end, and people said, ‘Call Rabbi Balkany,’ ” Brafman told me. “People who were not taking my calls took his calls, and he made inquiries and was able to convince the BOP to make the transfer.”

ndeed, by late January, as SAC continued to drag its heels on handing over the checks, Balkany himself drew on his track record with the Bureau of Prisons to take back control of the process: He called prosecutors himself and offered up Regensberg’s name in connection with a request to help other inmates get moved to halfway houses or better kosher food. “I’m just hoping by being a good Samaritan, or a good-will ambassador, to get Regensberg to cooperate,” he told an FBI investigator, unaware that the same man was investigating him.

One of the people who came to support Balkany in court every day was Chesed Halberstam, a long-bearded, bespectacled man who spent 17 years as a personal aide to the wife of Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He wore a yellow pin he proudly explained indicates he is awaiting the Messiah. Every morning, he took a bound copy of the Torah that had once belonged to the rebbe out of a black leather carrying case, handed it to Balkany, and then parked himself in the front row, just behind the defense table. I asked him why he took it from Balkany every time court recessed, instead of lending it to the rabbi for the duration of the trial. “It’s worth a great deal, so I don’t let it out of my sight,” explained Halberstam. He added that he hoped that the book might bring Balkany luck, even if he only held on to it a few hours each day. “He was just trying to help people, and they bring these ludicrous charges,” Halberstam said.

Courtroom 11B in the white-marble Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse, near City Hall, has hanging on its back wall a plaque of the Great Seal of the United States: an image of an eagle crowned by 13 tiny stars representing the original colonies, arranged in the pattern of a Star of David. On the second day of the trial, Sarah Balkany, a short, plump woman who sat through much of the trial studying her own small prayer book, spotted it, smiled, and leaned over to point it out to one of her daughters, Rosie, who smiled too and patted her mother’s hand.

Rosie, tall and blonde and pregnant, is married to the Chabad emissary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. One of the other Balkany daughters, Nechamie, is the rabbi’s wife at the Chabad outpost in Fort Myers, Florida. They dress modestly, but they manage to look chic: long-sleeved shirts with cardigans and shawls, clingy sweater dresses, slouchy boots, sheitel wigs cut in attractive shoulder-length styles. One afternoon, I followed another of Balkany’s daughters, a blonde nutritionist named Sheva, into the ladies’ room; she was heavily pregnant, and I commented that it couldn’t be easy for her to sit all day on the hard wooden pews. She asked me if I was a juror and relaxed when I said I was not, telling me that she was overdue with her first child. “If my water breaks, I’ll just leave quietly,” she said, laughing. “This trial doesn’t need any more drama.”

The Balkany women spent much of the trial studying their prayer books, occasionally leaning toward each other to whisper animatedly about this or that piece of gossip; the effect was to give the gallery area, separated by a low wall from the well where the attorneys and lawyers sat, the atmosphere of a shul.

The first week of the trial, I sat with Tom Robbins, a chipper, white-haired former Daily News reporter, now a columnist [25] for the Village Voice, who was drawn to the case for personal reasons: He was sued by Balkany in 2004 for defamation. (The case was later dismissed.) Robbins, no stranger to the myriad stripes of Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn, was nonetheless puzzled by the variations he had seen on display in the gallery. “Are they all Orthodox?” he asked, gesturing at two of Balkany’s younger daughters, who paraded in wearing short skirts paired with designer shoes: suede Prada peep-toes and racy black patent-leather Yves Saint Laurent platforms. Their youngest brother, Shmuel—who had his own turn in the news a couple of years ago, after being badly beaten [26] in Crown Heights—wore loafers emblazoned with the Prada logo. But even those who were less outwardly flashy are, it turns out, prone to secular adventures: The rabbi’s son Levi and his wife, Perel, had an Orthodox wedding [27] in 2004, but, according to public records, celebrated their first anniversary by getting married again in Las Vegas, at the infamous Little White Wedding Chapel [28], where Rev. Iann Schonken—who in 2004 performed the brief wedding of Britney Spears to her childhood friend Jason Alexander—officiated.

Their expensive clothes and jewelry would have been a passing curiosity had it not been for the heartbreaking testimony of one witness, called by the government: Chana Rivka Flaum, a tiny, girlish woman in flat shoes, bobbed sheitel, and heavy stockings. As the administrator at Bais Yaakov, she could explain exactly what drove Balkany to try and push his luck with Cohen: He was broke. According to state records, Balkany is carrying more than $200,000 in unpaid tax liens against his home in Borough Park. The school, which declared bankruptcy in 2005, vacated its original property—a 1960s-style building whose exterior wall still bears the ghostly outline of the name “Bais Yaakov”—and downsized into a much smaller facility a few miles east in Midwood.

Flaum was visibly anxious and overwhelmed on the witness stand. When Marc Berger, one of the prosecutors, asked her about whether the school had an endowment, she responded, “I don’t know what that means.” She described how she made payroll, or covered utilities, by cashing tuition checks from parents at a local check-cashing service; she said that in December of 2009, many of the teachers at the school had not been paid since the beginning of the school year. “How do you know that teachers had not been paid in December of 2009?” asked Berger. “Partly because I deal with payroll and partly because I had teachers asking me for money every day,” Flaum said, looking directly at Balkany, who looked down at his lap.

Ironically, it was the government that invoked the principles of Jewish law before the jury. “Well-reputed, prominent members of his community gave praise to Rabbi Balkany, and the acknowledgment, this acknowledgment had a Hebrew name,” Marc Berger, the 36-year-old deputy head of the securities task force in the U.S. attorney’s office, explained in his closing. “It was called a hakorus hatov.”

Berger, handsome, tall, and dark-haired, was the first to deliver his summation to the jury, on a Tuesday afternoon. His parents came to watch, as did his wife, Berit, who is also a lawyer. She sat at the back of the courtroom, rocking their napping newborn daughter in a car seat on the carpeted floor. “The defendant lied and used everyone around him to achieve his criminal goals,” declared Berger, who stood at a podium facing the jury, as Balkany sat behind his left shoulder, quietly clutching his Torah to his chest. “The evidence in this case really speaks for itself quite literally,” Berger went on. “Everything you need to find the defendant guilty of the crimes charged, it’s on tape.”

After a short break, Brafman got up to give his reply. Brafman is famous for his courtroom prowess—a performer so worth seeing that other lawyers stopped in to watch him. At five feet six inches, he barely reaches Berger’s shoulder, but as he took the podium, his barrel chest puffed out, and he seemed to fill the room. He adjusted his French cuffs and began. “Just so we’re clear, lying on those tapes, everybody lied,” he said. “There should be no question in your mind that everybody lied. Klotz lied to Balkany. Balkany lied to Klotz.” Brafman backed into the middle of the courtroom, away from his notes, speaking in increasingly outraged tones. “Are we nuts? We’re not nuts. None of us are nuts. I don’t think we’re nuts. But we’re listening to conversations that are nuts,” Brafman argued. “You can’t just convict Rabbi Balkany because he had some stupid conversations that the government has suggested to you show that he’s guilty of a crime,” he went on. “He did not act with the requisite criminal knowledge or intent that these crimes will require you to find beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Brafman paused, reaching into a repertoire that stretches back to his early days working for Robert Morgenthau in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. “Now, you have an argument with somebody, even somebody you love, whoever gets the last word, man, that’s a powerful moment, and that’s the advantage the government gets, because they have the disadvantage of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brafman said. “But here is my thought on that, and I think I’m right, and I hope you agree. They don’t have the last word. You do.” Let’s fight the man, was what he meant—you, me, and the rabbi against Steve Cohen and the government.

When he finished, after an astonishing hour and a half of high-volume exposition, Brafman collapsed into his leather seat, exhausted. Balkany turned to his family, his pale cheeks suddenly ruddy, a smile stretching beneath his beard as he surveyed them—almost all of his children present, except for Sheva, who had gone into labor. “That was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Balkany asked me, on his way out. He made his way through the crowd to the coat rack, where his black hat sat perched on the top shelf. Outside, in the white marble hallway, one of his daughters rushed to the bank of pay phones to make a phone call to the hospital; as her father came out into the hallway, she shreiked, “Sheva had her baby! Eight pounds!” Balkany’s smile grew broader.

The next morning, Jesse Furman got up to give the government’s response. Furman, a mild 38-year-old, is Brafman’s antithesis in almost every way: rumpled where Brafman is immaculately tailored, precisely spoken where Brafman releases Brooklyn-inflected torrents of words, an Upper West Sider who attends the traditional-egalitarian Ansche Chesed synagogue while Brafman is a trustee of Beth Sholom Synagogue in Lawrence, on Long Island. Furman’s father, Jay, is a successful real estate developer active in prominent New York and Jewish charities, while his mother, Gail, is a well-known Democratic fundraiser. His brother, Jason [29], is deputy director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Jesse Furman went from Harvard to Yale Law and clerked for Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

But Furman, too, could make a credible common-man plea to the jury: “We live in a country, a beautiful country, where no person, no person can be accused of a crime without the entitlement to a trial, where any person charged with a serious crime is entitled to a trial before a jury just like you.” We all came from somewhere, and we all worked hard to get from there, to where we are. “The Red Cross doesn’t use these kinds of lines to raise money,” Furman said, citing Balkany’s repeated reassurances to SAC’s representatives that if they handed over the cash he wanted, they wouldn’t have to sweat a government investigation. “This isn’t how the March of Dimes gets the money it uses for charity,” he added. “This is corruption, pure and simple.”

The jury was dispatched at just before 11 a.m., left to decide whether Balkany deserved anything from Steve Cohen, his fellow Jew. By 3:45, the jury had returned its verdict. It was a simple and definitive “no”—guilty, on all four counts.﻿

Mr. Varela’s case does not in the least interest the literary snobs of New York, London or Paris. His politics are all wrong so his martyrdom doesn’t register and certainly deserves no publicity except for a sneering put-down (although we doubt he has even received that in the American press). Now if he were a practicing Kabbalist, a Talmid chacham, a Muslim-hating atheist or a capitalist usurer with a propensity for the world of letters, it would be different. But alas, he is not. Thus it falls to us, the unaffiliated, unorganized independents and eccentrics to raise the injustice of his imprisonment, offer a latter-day homage to Catalonia and cheer his spirit with letters.

What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?

By Maria Poumier

BARCELONA, December, 2010 — He is in jail near Barcelona, incarcerated since Sunday December 12th (1) 2010 being sentenced for fifteen months. This is the end of a long run: the Catalonia’s court was after him since 1996, for publishing, selling and promoting books that the Jewish lobby dislike. At first, he was sued for H denial; but the supreme court of Spain decided in 2007 that this is not punishable in Spain, because “democracy relies on freedom of investigation and scientific knowledge, and history of WWII is a matter of science.” So now he was found guilty of promoting hate, and worse than that: he supposedly approved of the big H! Pedro Varela argues, how can you approve a genocide which you don’t believe it ever happened?

Usually, at present, in Spain, you don’t go to jail if the sentence is for less than 2 years, tells his lawyer. Pedro’s new sentence is for 15 months, still they sent him to jail.

The prosecutor, called Miguel Angel Aguilar, is a well known friend of SOS Racism, a Jewish-led body that needs to find racists in order to justify its existence, and find public funding by taxpayers. So is the principal judge, Mrs Estela, as Pedro explains.

The sentence punishes Pedro for his supposed intentions, not for any precise offence; but even accepting such a non-legal claim, it is not logical at all: it recognizes the right to sell any kind of books, but not the right to sell + publish + promote some of them, even when our society is based of the supreme law of marketing goods; the matter is not one particular book or another: there was no previously a list of forbidden books in Spain; most of the listing have already been published by other publishers, or are available for free on internet.

On the list of incriminating literature you can find a book by the psychologist Hans Eynseck (available on the shelves of the big Spanish store “El Corte Ingles”), a book against vivisection of animals, and some classics of the far right by German and Rumanian authors as well as the Spanish ones. But it is not a definitive list, and through the successive trials, it has grown or shrunk!...

So, as Pedro insists, this is much worse than the Inquisition of old: then you could obtain a list of forbidden books, and stay away from them, but now the list comes afterwards, it is absolutely foggy, and doesn’t come from any official desk, but from some mysterious foreign forces through their local servants.

As a matter of fact, Catalonia has always been seen by the rest of Spain as a Jewish enclave, with tight links with Genoa, next to its coasts. Barcelona has the only important Jewish community in Spain, with some 5000 persons. Bauer, Rothschild, Danone, are still important families of Barcelona, and the popular Catalan leader Jordi Pujol has sent his sons to a kibbutz. The Zionist thinker and art critic Max Nordau (son of Hungarian Sefaradi rabbi and poet Gabriel Sudfeld, of an old family from Saragossa) published in Barcelona his bright History of Spanish Painting, so he is considered a Catalan there. The book by Angel Pulido, an important writer who gave an intellectual renaissance to Sefer in Spain, has been translated to French by Max Nordau.

At the same time, Catalonia has strong anti-Israeli tendency: the projected Sarkozy’s conference on extending the European structures to the Mediterranean States (which means first of all institutionalizing the presence of Israel in the midst of these structures) was cancelled by the Catalan government, as a protest against the new settlements ordered by Netanyahu; last year, the Home Minister of Catalonia had lead the demos against the Gaza slaughter, and cancelled a H celebration on January 29th. This year, a popular sculptor called Eugenio Merino woke Israel’s wrath showing his “Ladder to Paradise” a prostrated Muslim under a kneeling Christian, under a standing up and laughing Rabbi. ADL and others of its ilk consider Spain as the most anti-Jewish country in Western Europe. The Jewish State was not recognized until 1986.

The US are not popular, but Wikileaks cables show that the government recently was ready to submit to the US ambassador Aguirre’s request when he asked to drop the charges against the US marines who murdered the cameraman Couso at the balcony of Hotel Palestine in Baghdad; the cases of using Spanish airports for the US “flying prisons”, and of torture in Guantanamo will be probably dropped as well. Spain considers it has “universal jurisdiction,” as Belgium claimed, until Belgian judges tried to judge Ariel Sharon.

In such a hot battlefield, the old-fashioned Nazi literature Pedro was selling is not a real danger for anybody, mostly because Spaniards cannot claim to belong to the supposedly sublime Nordic race: real hyperborean master folk have always laughed at the Spanish, and considered them “degenerated African bastards”. Catalans indeed have a tendency to a scornful and racist nationalism, but Varela is not a separatist Catalan. The reference to German self-adoring mythology is used against Varela because it allows viewing him as a Halloween ghost from a remote past.

Pedro Varela enjoys his peculiar fame: he is Catholic, vegetarian and alpinist; he wishes to advance further in his quest. As he says, he is guilty of a kind of sin no one can withdraw or repent: the search for freedom of mind, not only for his Nazi fellows, but for whole Spain.

Write this imprisoned bookseller in Spanish or in English:

Señor Pedro VARELA

Centro Penitenciario Brians 1

Apartado de Correos 1000

08760-Martorell

Barcelona, Spain

****

These columns are not free. They are made possible through the sale of Michael Hoffman’s books, newsletters and recordings, and by donations.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Letter to New York Times reporter David E. SangerDear Mr. SangerWhy did you omit mention of the recent, Nov. 29 assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari in your Dec. 10 report on U.S. opposition to Iranian nuclear power?You mentioned the Stuxnet “worm” whose provenance pre-dates the assassination, but the not the assassination itself, or the murder of another scientist’s wife, Mrs. Fereydoon Abbasi, in the same attack.Sincerely,Michael HoffmanNote how Sanger (below) reports that Gary Samore, an Obama administration official, is pleased that covert attacks against Iran, such as the Stuxnet worm, are in place. By omitting reference to the recent assassination of the Iranian scientist, Sanger does not have to ask the administration any embarrassing questions about whether they are pleased about that covert operation as well. Furthermore, it seems that Mr. Sanger, along with most of the US media including NPR, intends to have us forget about the terror attack against Iran’s scientists. By omission and distortion, the US propaganda system, in which Mr. Sanger is a prominent player, seeks to teach us that terror attacks worth remembering occur only against the Israelis and the West, not Muslims or Iranians.Gary Samore represented the Obama administration on Iran at the conference of the noble-sounding “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies” ((http://www.defenddemocracy.org) which David Sanger fails to mention is actually a neocon front group whose “Leadership council” consists of Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joe Lieberman and William Kristol.U.S. and Allies Plan More Sanctions Against Iranhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/world/middleeast/11nuke.html?hpby David E. Sanger | NY Times | Dec. 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — Three days after the first nuclear talks with Iran in more than a year adjourned with no progress, President Obama’s chief nuclear adviser said on Friday that the United States and its allies planned a new round of sanctions against the country in coming weeks, part of an effort to test “how high Iran’s pain threshold is” and force the country into suspending its production of nuclear fuel.

Another session of talks with Iran is scheduled to take place next month, probably in Turkey. But at a conference on Friday held by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Mr. Obama’s coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, Gary Samore, suggested that Iran may have decided to resume talks with the with the members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany “because it believes it can manipulate the appearance of negotiations to weaken existing sanctions and avoid additional measures.”

“This ploy will not work,” Mr. Samore said. “In the wake of the Geneva talks, we and our allies are determined to maintain and even increase pressure. We need to send the message to Iran that sanctions will only increase if Iran avoids serious negotiations and will not be lifted until our concerns are fully addressed.”

Mr. Samore was not specific about the sanctions now being contemplated. He also would not comment on the effects of the Stuxnet worm, which appears to have been directed at disrupting Iran’s centrifuges.

“I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines,” he said with a smile, “and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.” But he said nothing about who was responsible for the worm. (END QUOTE)

Monday, December 06, 2010

The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic

With new material added

A great educational tool!

The record of the persecution of German-Canadian heretic Ernst Zundel by a de facto Sanhedrin, for publishing the book, Did Six Million Really Die? is almost too fantastic to countenance. Zundel faced two years in prison if convicted. His defense was initially regarded by the press and public as preposterous. "How can anyone deny the Holocaust?" was the incredulous response to the news that Zundel would vigorously defend himself and the free speech rights of all Canadians. The trial was expected to be a quick and ignominious rout of Zundel and his supporters. But in a startling reversal, the "survivors" who had appeared in court in order to send him to jail, had to submit their "testimony" to scrutiny, the rules of evidence and cross-examination, something that had never happened before and has never happened since.

Canadians grew ever more surprised and shocked at the amazing admissions which the defense team elicited from the supposed "eyewitnesses" to the homicidal gas chambers. As a result, television reporters and print journalists who covered the trial for more than eight weeks in 1985 produced broadcasts and news reports that turned Canada upside down.

The Great Holocaust Trial is the only revisionist account of Ernst Zundel's first trial, one of the few times in history when so-called "Holocaust survivors" were subjected to cross-examination by a counsel for the defense as astute, fearless and well-informed as Douglas Christie.

The first trial also pitted Dr. Raul Hilberg, who provided "expert historical" testimony intended to send Zundel to prison, against the learned Dr. Robert Faurisson, adviser to defense attorney Christie. It is not an exaggeration to say that, guided by Faurisson's knowledge and the researchers from around the world who aided this French scholar, Mr. Christie's cross-examination demolished the credibility of an academic who, at the time, was considered the world's leading authority on "The Holocaust" and the chemical "killing chambers" of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 1995 Hoffman expanded the book to include an account of the second trial of 1988, when Ernst Zundel produced the Leutcher Report, an unprecedented, on-site forensic examination of Auschwitz by "Mr. Death" - Fred Leutcher - the U.S. prison system's own capital punishment engineer.

In addition to Hoffman's new introductory essay, "There Should be no Talmudic Hierarchy of Victimhood," this 2010 edition contains an aftermath chronology which updates the reader on major occurrences in revisonism since 1995, including Mr. Zundel's lengthy imprisonment in Canada and Germany. It also includes two appendices: the first by Fred A. Leutcher Jr.; the second concerning a documentary film about Mr. Leutcher made by Errol Morris.

For several years revisionist colleagues have urged us to bring this important history back into print, and thanks to donations from dedicated truth-seekers, we are gratified to have accomplished this objective, twenty-five years after the first trial, as testimony to a flame that will not die, even in the darkest penal hole.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Hoffman's Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary (Fourth) Edition: "There Should be no Talmudic Hierarchy of Victimhood"; Preface to the Third Edition; The Great Holocaust Trial (1985): Genesis; Inquisition; The Image; The Relentless Crusade. The Second Great Holocaust Trial (1988): The Context. Aftermath 1995-2010. Appendix I: The Ordeal of Fred Leutcher. Appendix II: Two Views of the film, "Mr. Death"; Bibliography and reference resources

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The Great Holocaust Trial:

The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West's Most Sacred Relic

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Please help to advertise this classic book, which has inspired thousands of people to begin to question the homicidal Auschwitz gas chamber hoax of the 20th century. Help us keep it permanently in print and amply advertised. This is one of the most effective, accessible and popular books for converting true believers into doubters!

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

National Public Radio's pro-Israeli bias in downplaying a Nov. 29, 2010 terror bombing against Iranians and presenting Israeli agent Jeffrey Goldberg as an objective observer of Iranian and Arab affairs, is exposed by former Associated Press reporter Michael Hoffman.

Hoffman analyzes statements by Robert Siegel, Peter Kenyon and Mr. Goldberg, as heard on the "All Things Considered" broadcast of Nov. 29. Here is documentary confirmation of NPR's disinformation, betrayal of the public trust and complicity in the Zionist propaganda system.

The case of Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work

Petras Stankeras

by Michael Hoffman • www.RevisionistHistory.org

Efraim Zuroff’s tirade against Lithuanian “Holocaust denial" (see below) is a textbook example of the Talmudic inquisition at work. I say “Talmudic” because the notion of a supreme level of cosmic suffering and horror far above that of any non-Judaic nation is a thoroughly Talmudic prerogative of the Master Race of Holy People. Lithuanian historian Petras Stankeras can’t question the kangaroo Nuremberg Trials because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People. Mr. Stankeras can’t question the magical Six Million figure because such questions offend the Master Race of Holy People, and for the same reason he must not state the fact that there is no document from Hitler ordering extermination.

“Blatant Holocaust denial” is a loopy pseudo-legal term cooked up by Deborah Lipstadt and then universally imposed on the language of the world by the poor persecuted ones. This is heresy-hunting, not law or history.

Notice how Mr. Zuroff feels free to accuse the entire nation of Lithuania (“Lithuanian society”) of deep-seated dishonesty and guilt for horrible crimes. But don’t anyone dare say such things about Israeli society! By the Talmudic standard, Judaics are the judges of the gentiles; gentiles are never fit to judge Judaics. Negative generalization about Israelis is a step on the road to another victimizing ‘Holocaust,” while negative generalization about “Lithuanian society” is a righteous corrective against a nation of “Holocaust” criminals.

This is the Talmudic double-standard that Lithuania must swallow if they want to be a "member in good standing of the European Union and Nato.” This is the reverse racism that historian Petras Stankeras must embrace if he wants to restore his career and gain back his position in the Ministry of the Interior.

The most heinous offense of all on the part of the Lithuanians is to dare to even think for a moment that what their nation suffered under Soviet Communism, including at the hands of Christian-hating Soviet Judaics, was in any way equivalent to what the Mater Race of Holy People experienced under the Nazis. How dare any gentile for even a moment compare his or her family’s suffering to that of the Holy People! Outrageous!

Efraim Zuroff:

"Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.”

According to the Talmud, in all things, Judaics are higher, more noble, more suffering, more persecuted than non-Judaics. There can be no equality (“equivalence”) between the two, most especially in the realm of war crimes and genocide upon which Judaics have a proprietary (and lucrative) trademark.

Not to worry, however. Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. government’s "special ambassador to combat antisemitism” has arranged for a massive “Holocaust" education indoctrination “seminar" for Lithuanian teachers, who will be taught to know their place as inferiors and dutifully conform to the Talmudic hierarchy of victimhood.

***

US must take a tougher line on Baltic revisionism

Why has the US remained silent while European nations roundly condemn Holocaust denial by a Lithuanian government official?

The resignation late last week of historian Petras Stankeras from his post as a "senior specialist" at the Lithuanian ministry of the interior received little attention in the US, but the scandal that prompted his decision to give up his job should set off a red warning light in Washington, and especially in the state department and the US embassy in Vilnius.

The story began two weeks ago with the publication in the 8 November issue of the popular news weekly Veidas of an article by Stankeras to mark the 65th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials in which he described the proceedings as a "clearly wrong judicial investigation", and openly and unequivocally denied the Holocaust.According to the now former government official, one of the major failings of the Nuremberg trials was that they "provided a legal basis for the legend about 6 million supposedly murdered Jews, although the court did not have a single document signed by Hitler on the extermination of Jews (no one has found this document to this day, if it even exists, although a million-dollar prize has been promised).”

While such a blatant assertion of Holocaust denial has never been the norm in Lithuania, a member in good standing of the European Union and Nato, anyone closely following the policies of the government on Holocaust-related issues over the years could not have failed to discern a deep-seated reluctance to honestly confront its Holocaust past and especially the extensive collaboration of local Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of Jews, primarily inside Lithuania, but outside its borders as well. From an abysmal failure to punish any of the Lithuanians who participated in the annihilation of Jews to a clear tendency in history books and textbooks to hide or minimise local complicity in Holocaust crimes, to a total failure on the issue of restitution, Lithuanian society has not even begun to tell the truth about its Holocaust history and truthfully deal with its implications.

Worse, Lithuania has been the leader of a insidious campaign to try to distort the history of the Holocaust by seeking recognition that Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis. This false equivalence would unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally-accepted uniqueness and historical significance, turning the worst case of genocide in human history into merely one of many tragedies.

All this has been going on with increasing intensity in recent years, virtually unopposed and unchallenged, neither within the European Union nor in Nato, but Stankeras' article has now proved the catalyst for action in Europe. In a letter signed by the ambassadors to Lithuania of six EU members – Britain, Estonia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – there is not only an unequivocal and strong condemnation of the Holocaust denial and the lack of any public or official Lithuanian protest, but for the first time, there is an open denunciation of Lithuanian efforts to create a false equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. The letter condemns the recent decision of a court in Klaipeda to allow the use of swastikas "as a traditional Lithuanian symbol", and goes on to denounce "Spurious attempts … to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent either in their intention or their result."

...this week, the US embassy in Vilnius is conducting a special Holocaust education seminar for Lithuanian teachers, financed by a grant announced by Rosenthal (Hannah Rosenthal, the US "special ambassador to combat antisemitism” -Ed.) during her visit to Lithuania this past spring....

(Emphasis supplied)

Comment from a reader:

Why on earth would anyone imply that crimes committed towards Jews by the Nazis is somehow worse than crimes committed towards other ethnic groups by the communists? Do you have any idea of the type of tactics they used? Everything ranging from execution to torture to starvation! And they killed by far many times more people than the Nazis ever did. Furthermore, they did attempt to wipe out complete ethnic groups. What about the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Six million starved Ukrainian men, women, and children. No big deal to the person (Zuroff) who wrote this piece though right?

TEHRAN — Unidentified assailants riding motorcycles launched separate bomb attacks here on Monday against two of the country’s top nuclear scientists, killing one and prompting accusations that the United States and Israel were again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

...The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the professors’ cars and then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian media reports. Mr. Abbasi’s wife was also hurt in the blast, the reports said. Last January, a remote-controlled bomb killed a physics professor, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, outside his home....

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the semiofficial IRNA news agency. His injured colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, is believed to be even more important; he is on the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list for ties to the Iranian nuclear effort...

Israel and the United States have often signaled that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Neither has acknowledged pursuing sabotage or assassinations there, but both are widely believed to be pursuing ways to undermine the country’s nuclear program...

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” said a (U.S.) federal official who assesses scientific intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re both top scientists.”

P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, did not address the Iranian accusations in detail. “All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened,” he said.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Editor’s note: Someday, probably far in the future, there will be a public revelation in the corporate media that "Al Qaeda” is a false flag operation, created, shepherded, and managed at the top, by certain western intelligence agencies.

*****

Al-Qaeda’s Christian Massacre: Aiding and Abetting the Occupation of Palestine

If we are to believe the voice on those Osama bin Laden tapes, the elusive al-Qaeda leader cares deeply about Palestine. Yet the actions of the terrorist network he supposedly still directs all too often belie its statements of concern for their “brothers” under Israeli occupation.

The massacre of Iraqi Christians at Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad also makes one wonder about claims that the group has “a great sense of timing.” The slaughter of Catholic Mass-goers occurred just one week after church leaders from across the Middle East had forcefully condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

More than 200 members of 14 different churches had gathered in Rome for a papal synod to address concerns about Christian emigration from the region. However, as one commentator observed, “Time and again, they turned the discussions … towards the Palestinian question.”

In their final communiqué, the bishops urged the international community to apply UN Security Council resolutions and take “the necessary legal steps to put an end to the occupation of the different Arab territories.” Significantly, they charged the Israeli occupation with causing tensions that have led to the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.

In a follow-up news conference, the archbishop in charge of the committee that drafted the communiqué, Cyrille Salim Bustros, rejected any biblical justification for the Zionist project. “The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,” he said. “Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestine.”

Not surprisingly, Tel Aviv was none too pleased with this serious challenge to the legitimacy of the self-described Jewish state. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon issued a statement condemning the bishops. The synod, he said, had been “hijacked by an anti-Israel majority,” turning it into “a forum for political attacks on Israel in the best history of Arab propaganda.” In particular, his government was “appalled” by Archbishop Bustros’ “outrageous comments,” describing them as “a libel against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

One week later, the Anti-Defamation League sought to enlist Pope Benedict XVI to Israel’s side. Expressing condolences over the Baghdad killings, ADL leaders asked the pope to “join together to eliminate all terrorism in the name of religion” and “to use the Church’s moral authority to prevent Israel from being made a pariah by its enemies.”

But with the Israeli occupation under such censure from Rome, it was a rather odd time for avowed supporters of the Palestinian cause to slaughter Catholics in the Middle East. Indeed, many Iraqi Muslims harbour “suspicions” about the shadowy al-Qaeda front’s targeting of “essentially non-players” in the country’s post-invasion sectarian strife.

Indeed, if anyone benefited from the church massacre it was Israel. Reminiscent of the Zionist underground’s attacks on Iraqi Jews in the 1950s, this assault on the Christian minority was clearly designed to encourage them to flee the country where they had lived in relative peace and prosperity for two millennia.

The removal of a Christian presence from the Muslim-dominated region would eliminate the model of coexistence as a viable alternative to the “clash of civilizations” view of the world. “By focusing attention on a direct and eternal conflict between the West and Islam,” M. Shahid Alam argues in his new book, the clash thesis aims “to acquit Israel of serving as the chief source and conduit of this conflict.”

Moreover, the massacre lent plausibility to the Israeli narrative on why Christians are leaving the Middle East. In a 2006 report by the hawkishly pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, titled “The Christian Exodus from the Middle East,” senior fellows Jonathan Adelman and Agota Kuperman concluded: “The single greatest cause of this emigration is radical Islam.”

Ironically, it was a representative from Baghdad at the synod who had suggested a way to encourage Middle East emigrants to return to Palestine. Armenian Archbishop Emmanuel Dabbaghian proposed that every bishop should make an annual visit to the Holy Land. “The influx of pilgrims to the Holy Land,” he said, “would convince the inhabitants who have emigrated to return to their homeland.” Given the apprehension about “the Arab demographic threat,” such a development would be viewed with trepidation in Tel Aviv.

“Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent,” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in a 2009 article in Commentary magazine. “Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.” Still, it’s an improvement on the “at least 80 percent Jews” that David Ben-Gurion said would be necessary for “a viable and stable state” on the eve of the premeditated ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

In contrast to al-Qaeda’s efforts to drive a wedge between Islam and Christianity, the solidarity between the world’s two largest religions in Palestine poses a real threat to the Israeli occupation.
Sabeel, an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians, in its “Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism,” affirms “that Palestinians are one people, both Muslim and Christian” and rejects “all attempts to subvert and fragment their unity.”

Couldn’t the Baghdad church massacre also be seen as an attempt to “subvert and fragment” Palestinian unity? With “brothers” like al-Qaeda, who needs enemies?

Thursday, November 18, 2010

...American officials in Afghanistan used to call Col. Abdul Razzik a "malignant actor" who must be sidelined. Now they hail the suspected drug lord as a hero of the new Kandahar offensive and a leader with national potential.

Col. Razzik—an illiterate 34-year-old Afghan Border Police officer who calls himself General, wears flashy Swiss watches and controls southern Afghanistan's lucrative border crossing with Pakistan—emerged over the past two months as the coalition's top choice for clearing Taliban strongholds in Kandahar province, the campaign's centerpiece and the insurgents' heartland.

His reversal of fortune reflects a departure from U.S. counterinsurgency efforts to better governance, marginalize crime-tainted power brokers and win civilians' trust. Since U.S. Gen. David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in July, the military has focused more on killing as many Taliban as possible with the help of whatever local allies can be found, including strongmen whose abuses had made the Taliban popular in the first place...

Col. Razzik, who says he has been working on some operations with the CIA but denies receiving the agency's money, is...a central actor in the crime-tainted political network that maintains a stranglehold over southern Afghanistan, allegedly rigging elections, collecting protection money and smuggling drugs...

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Hoffman analyzes the propaganda system’s presentation of the religion of Holcaustianity as objective history, in terms of its function as the expression of the Talmudic mentality, and the dual standards which this mentality imposes on the genocide debate, with certain prerogatives and immunities reserved solely for a privileged few, denominated by Hoffman as the "Master Race of Holy People." Hoffman's point of departure is a Zionist protest over the appearance of Dr. Norman Finkelstein at Rutgers University in November, 2010.

A national frenzy has seized America. Fierce debate and name-calling has raged about job losses, the nation’s growing $12 trillion debt, mandatory health care, socialism – and even witchcraft. Sarah Palin, the patron saint of low IQ Americans, has hovered over this sordid contest like an evil Halloween wraith.

If we believe polls, the Democrats look like toast. President Barack Obama may be ready to join the ranks of the unemployed.

What did Democrats think would happen when they eagerly took over the monumental financial and military mess created by George W. Bush and the Republicans? No wonder Republicans are gleefully rubbing their hands. But now they may be next to get stuck with Bush’s Tar Baby.

Amidst all the low-brow invective, Tom Brokaw, the respected former national news host for NBC News, recently wrote a fine opinion column, “The Wars That America Forgot About.”

He (Brokaw) quite rightly asked why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been ignored during the election race. After nine years of combat, 5,000 US dead and 35,000 seriously wounded soldiers, and expenditure of over $1 trillion – silence.

These longest and second most expensive wars in US history have dropped off the radar. Not even the latest WikiLeaks shocker, which revealed the US condoning death squads, torture and mass human rights violations in Iraq, became a campaign issue.

No one raised the scandalous fact that US-run Afghanistan and Washington’s political satraps there produce and export 94% of the world’s heroin. Russian drug authorities just claimed that Afghan heroin kills 10,000 Russians annually.

The Iraq and Afghan wars are ignored, Brokaw rightly says, because Americans are totally focused on high unemployment and economic insecurity. America’s wars have become irrelevant.

The US professional military represents less than 1% of the population, mostly working-class people from small towns in America’s rural, poorly-educated heartland. It’s not like Vietnam War days, when millions of Americans were drafted to serve in the war, creating huge public protests that eventually ended the war. The US has adopted Imperial Britain’s model of small, all-volunteer armies fighting in remote colonial wars to supposedly bring the light of Christianity and justice to benighted natives.

However, it now costs $1 million per annum to keep each of the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The US has also deployed over 40,000 armed mercenaries in that nation.

Americans have become psychologically detached from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even as the specter of stalemate or even defeat in both conflicts looms. Brokaw calls on Americans to re-engage and give their wars and politicians the public attention they urgently need. Waging stealth wars is undemocratic and unwise.

During World War II, America’s “Home Front” was engaged in the conflict by war taxes, rationing, buying war bonds, collecting clothing and metal, and accepting shortages of consumer products.

By contrast, President George W. Bush actually cut income taxes in wartime, the only time in US history this has happened. In an act of profound financial deception, instead of funding the Afghan and Iraq Wars through higher taxes, the Bush White House and subservient Congress financed the wars by “Emergency Supplement Requests,” which were supposed to be only used short-term for natural disasters and the like. Bush’s view appears to have been, “après moi, le deluge.” He raised the national debt to vertiginous levels, vastly expanded the size of government, increased military spending by 50%, on top of cutting taxes.

The first wave of the deluge came in 2007-2008, as a financial cataclysm hit America. More is on the way as the US stumbles from one financial crisis to another - the latest being bankrupt states and pension funds.

The real $1 trillion plus costs of the wars were quietly added to the $12 trillion national debt, America’s credit card. Funds to finance these huge war loans was borrowed from China and Japan, putting America ever deeper in thrall to the Asian powers, and undermining its finances. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress continued Bush’s dishonest method of war finance, hiding costs from the public.

America’s wars should be fully funded through direct taxes. History shows great powers cannot long go on waging imperial wars on credit. Look at Spain, Holland, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Which empire do we think will be next?

A special war tax ought to be levied on all Americans to fully cover the mounting costs of Afghanistan and Iraq. We must pay for our wars and world hegemony.

It will be interesting to see how all the flag-waving Republican “patriots” will react when asked to pay for the wars they so passionately support from the safety of their sofas, and at no apparent cost. Make Americans actually pay for Afghanistan and Iraq and these wars would be ended in short order.

But if Republicans likely retake Congress, it is most unlikely a war tax – or any major new taxes –will be implemented. Republicans have gone from being the party of balanced budgets and pay as you go to a northern version of Argentina’s wild spending Peronista Party. Right-wing Republicans will press for more war, in more places – financed, of course, by the magic of credit. Few stop to think that this manic borrowing it wrecking America.

(Emphasis supplied)

Low IQ Americans and Our Republican Future

by Michael Hoffman

The war tax is with us, but it is hidden. It appears in the form of under-funded schools and colleges, much less money for infrastructure, roads, bridges, hospitals, parks, rail and mass transit; attacks on Social Security and Medicare. Bush’s wars have drained the quality of life out of America and led to the near-collapse of the usurious banking system.

The low-IQ crowd will back Republicans stripping the American people of quality schools, high speed rail and health care while they increase spending on wars to make the world safe for Israeli terror and dispossession.

It’s expensive to take on 800 million people; supposedly we sort out the good Muslims (neutral on Israeli genocide) from the evil fanatics (“holocaust-denying” devils). The equation still leaves several hundred million “bad” people we supposedly have to fight. Low-IQers can’t seem to fathom that such a fight will continue to be exorbitantly costly and make a mockery of all talk of fiscal responsibility from Republicans, who will skin poor and working class Americans to serve their racist, Talmudic Israeli masters.

Here in Coeur d’Alene almost the entire state government of Idaho met this past weekend under the auspices of the US Chamber of Commerce —Communist China’s agent in bankrupting working class America while making super-rich traitors even wealthier. The meeting was a self-congratulatory "states rights” and “patriot” extravaganza on the part of the “conservative Republicans” who rule Idaho.

You have to have a very low IQ indeed to imagine that the Republican party of War Zionism and mass export of US jobs to Asia is going to “balance the budget” or bring us peace and prosperity.